Operating heavy equipment in construction and worksite environments may be hazardous. Heavy equipment may be slow to bring to a stop, and visibility of an operator of the heavy equipment may be limited, thereby increasing the likelihood of an incident occurring involving a person in close proximity to the heavy equipment. Frequently heavy equipment and machinery requires a substantial safety zone around the equipment, and it is difficult for an operator to detect when a person has entered that zone.
While it may be desirable to alert an operator whenever a person is within proximity of a piece of heavy equipment or machinery, the operator may be required to be in proximity to other operators of other pieces of equipment, such when operators of multiple pieces of equipment must operate together to load a truck or otherwise perform work at a site. Alerting an operator operation of a piece of equipment whenever any person enters proximity of the equipment would substantially interrupt operation of the equipment by the operator.
Traditional workplace safety systems require substantial infrastructure to be incorporated at a particular workplace, such as by installing various hardware and detectors for maintaining safety at the particular workplace. However, at some locations it may be difficult, if not impossible, to install substantial infrastructure due to geographic remoteness and lack of resources at a particular workplace. Examples of such locations may include quarries and similar areas where aggregate materials are retrieved or stored. Further, such infrastructure may be extremely expensive to install and maintain.
What is needed, therefore, is system and method for tracking one or more persons who enter proximity of heavy equipment and providing an alert if proximity to those persons creates is determined to be an unsafe condition, such system requiring a minimal amount of infrastructure to track proximity and provide alerts if dangerous proximity is detected.